The really valuable skills today are in knowing how to find information and (more important) how to critically assess what you find. Here is a guide to navigating the jungle of information out there in the digital wilds: What is the source of the information? There is no single unimpeachable source of information (that’s right, not even the SGU). Some sources are better than others, however. Academic sites have been found, when checked for quality, to be the most reliable. Other institutions may also be reliable. If accuracy is important to their reputation, there is likely a team of people working on content, some sort of editorial process or peer review, and they don’t have an extreme agenda. Group blogs by professionals are also usually good sources of information. They’re more credible than individual blogs or web pages, which are highly variable depending on the individual. Commercial sites are generally less trustworthy. The worst sites, however, are extreme ideological sites that exist to promote a specific narrative. Sometimes the goal is to promote a narrative and sell you stuff, as on the infamous medical conspiracy site Natural News. But, as I said, no one site is perfect. So you need to look at a variety of sources. Further, it’s important to find out where that source got its information from—what the primary source is. It’s common on the web for sites to reproduce or simply link to other sources of information (that’s what the web means). You have to track information back to the original source. Sometimes that original source isn’t reliable, even though it is being repeated by mainstream outlets. It’s also possible that the original source, which may be a published scientific study or primary journalism, has been misrepresented by secondary sources. At other times one primary source gets repeated so many times that you may think it is many sources, but all roads lead back to the same primary. It’s extremely important that you specifically look for a variety of sources and opinions. Before I accept any claim, I always want to know who disagrees with that claim and what the reasons are for their rejection of it. If possible, I then want to find out how the first side answers their critics, and how the critics answer these responses. In essence it’s important to follow a discussion through to the end. Sometimes you don’t know who has the better position until you’ve heard all the point-counterpoints and find out who has the last word. You also need to independently examine the arguments of each side to see who has the better arguments. Which side has better sources of evidence? Which side uses more valid logic? If one side has to consistently resort to logical fallacies and distortions, and never really answers their critics, they probably have a weak position. It’s possible that neither side is completely right or completely wrong. That doesn’t mean there is always a balance. Sometimes one side is completely wrong (like anti-vaxxers). Sometimes the answer is pretty much in between two extremes, and sometimes we just don’t have the answer and you have to reserve judgment. It’s perfectly okay to say that you don’t have an opinion about a topic if you don’t feel you’ve done adequate research. It is also extremely useful to check yourself against other people you respect and who have the appropriate expertise. I always check my understanding of a topic against the experts when I can. If my take is different from theirs, I need to find out why. Usually it means I’m missing something. You need to make a concerted effort not to cherry-pick—don’t just accept the first answer, or the answer you want. Don’t seek out an expert who agrees with you and then conclude that you must be correct. Seek out experts who disagree with you. Those are the people you need to listen to. The process is never over. All conclusions are tentative, and you should not stake them out forever or make them part of your identity. If you learn new information, happily incorporate it into your assessment. Take pride in the ability to change your mind. This doesn’t mean you never have strong opinions, just that they should be only as strong as the evidence and logic support, and open to revision. Here are some personal adventures we have had in using skeptical scientific thinking to learn about, and sometimes debunk, topics over the years. Grab your towel, put on your slippers, and join us as we venture forth into the wilderness. It is often frustrating, sometimes scary, but always rewarding.

It is a widely held notion that we are a disillusioned people living in a disenchanted age. Indeed, a belief that scientific advance inevitably leads to the demystification of the world - an eventuality that is sometimes celebrated and sometimes deplored - is so prevalent that is virtually a modern axiom.
But to interpret mystery so passively - to think of it as being merely the effect of ignorance - is to neglect the implications of the active verb form: to mystify. Mystification does not, exclusively, happen: it can also be enacted. To mystify and to demystify are valid alternatives which humans can, if they choose, use in the pursuit of their individual or collective purposes.

One of the iconic images of the coming climate apocalypse is the starving polar bear sitting mournfully atop a melting ice floe. Polar bears are adorable, and no one wants them to die. And what better symbol of global warming than endangered polar bears? In his 2006 hit climate change documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore showed a sad, animated polar bear floating away on a melting ice floe, presumably to its death. A campaign by environmentalists successfully convinced the US government to declare the polar bear “endangered” in 2008. However, on a global level, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which decides which animals and plants are endangered, was only willing to call the bear “vulnerable”; this had been the outcome of every evaluation except one since 1982. The prediction that the polar bear would suffer immensely because of a lack of summer ice was always somewhat odd. Polar bears survived through the last interglacial period 130,000 to 115,000 years ago, when it was significantly warmer than it is now. They also survived the first thousands of years of the current interglacial period, when arctic sea ice cover was strongly reduced and there were even long periods of ice-free summers in the central Arctic Ocean. When Polar Bear Specialist Group conservationists began studying the polar bear population in the 1960s, they clearly found that the biggest threat was indiscriminate hunting. At that time, it was thought that the global population of polar bears was around 5,000 to 19,000. Hunting was regulated, and by 1981 the official estimate had increased to almost 23,000. Since then their numbers have been growing overall. The group’s latest official estimate comes from 2019, and is the biggest yet at 26,500. Clearly, this is a conservation success that we should celebrate. Yet, given that the polar bear has been used for so long as an icon of climate change doom, this finding is actually quite embarrassing for campaigners. The result? Polar bears have been quietly dropped from the climate change narrative. The Guardian, a British newspaper that sees its mission as responding to the “climate crisis,” decided in 2019 that it would no longer illustrate as many climate stories with polar bears. Similarly, the federal government’s Arctic Report Card heavily chronicled the decline of polar bears in its 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2014 reports, but now, with official estimates showing that their population is not declining, polar bears no longer get a mention. Nor did Al Gore’s follow-up 2017 film, An Inconvenient Sequel, find room to share the good news about the bear’s survival. The real threat to polar bears isn’t climate change, it’s people. Every year around the Arctic, hunters kill almost nine hundred of them. That’s more than three polar bears out of every one hundred that exist, every year. If we want to protect them, rather than dramatically reducing carbon emissions to try to tweak temperatures over many decades with a clearly uncertain impact on polar bear populations, our first step should be to stop shooting them. In fact, when it comes to species extinction, of both fauna and flora, human behavior is a much larger factor than climate change. The World Wildlife Fund Living Planet Report, published in 2018, finds that exploitation (e.g., overfishing) and habitat loss (converting nature into farms and cities) are responsible for about 70 to 80 percent of all threats to species. When we look at what influences species extinction, climate change is one of the smallest factors: 5 to 12 percent. A 2016 study published in Nature similarly suggests that overexploitation, agriculture, and urban development are the most prevalent threats to species, with climate change the least important of seven factors. This means that prosaic actions would be most helpful: things like regulating fisheries and ensuring more space for nature. So, yes, if we want to save our plants and animals, we need to change our behavior. But not in the ways that climate activists will tell you.